How was the start of 2021 for you? Did you come in excited at what the year would hold and set a whole bunch of intentions? If so how’s that going for you? Alternatively you may have felt frustration at the lack of movement feeling it is your time to shine that you have put in the work and yet you still have to taste the fruits of your labour. As the Taylor Swift quotation suggests both ends of these emotions can be found in red. Today I want to share some ideas about what’s really going on when you feel frustrated based on my own learning.
Slowing down to speed up
One of the keys to success is slowing down something that can be hard to access if you are working with Mars, the red bottle in the image. Mars is all about taking action. Let me put in terms that may be more familiar to you if you have ever worked with Myers Briggs. Those who are ST or SF are coming from a logical reasoning perspective and do things based on experience. If something isn’t working they will do more of the same activity, only with more vigour believing that hard work will lead to results. For these kinds of folks what’s needed is a fresh approach and getting together with an NT or NF will help them determine what other options or ways of looking it there might be. Of course nothing is immovable. I started my working life as an ST and am now an NF!
The other key ingredient in slowing down
Slowing down requires patience which is in short supply in today’s world where there’s an expectation that you should be able to access anything at the click of a button! There is in fact a reservoir of patience if you go deep enough. A good way of accessing it is through meditation or as is my preference, contemplation, a more active style of accessing your inner world. There is such a yearning for stillness today and in many respects Covid-19 has given us the space to access it.
Where else does more patience help?
You can apply the same ideas to working with clients. As a coach who has a lot of red energy it took me a long time to work this out. I would get a nibble of interest and then would overwhelm my potential client with all my enthusiasm. Offering them lots of ideas or ways of accessing my content rather than taking it one step at a time. I have learnt to take a breath and take it one step at a time.
You may be reading this and say I know all this and that’s great. I would say to you at what level do you know this? Is it at the head level so intellectually? Perhaps you know it at the heart level – do you know it deep in the core of you being? If not take a moment to be with these words, let them sink in.
Another trap…
Another element that fuels frustration is the sense that nothing is happening. You may have a big vision of how you want to serve the world. You even get lots of likes on social media but little take up of your offers. You have been consistently showing up and still nothing is moving.
The danger here is that you use the energy within Mars to force action. This can cause the complete opposite of what you want. I know because that happened to me recently. I had a wonderful group that I had created and then I got a vision for it. I shared it with one member who was interested and volunteered to socialise the idea with one of the more influential members. For various reasons that didn’t happen so in the end I thought I would get people on board. Unfortunately for me they didn’t see things the same way I did. The harder I pushed for it, the more they resisted until I felt as if I was going to self-combust.
If you notice this happening then it’s all about letting your idea go; surrendering to what is. You cannot force it. In fact many times it’s about allowing yourself to be enveloped in no-thingness. I like to refer to it as the space in between, and there creativity can find you in the most extraordinary ways.
And remember even when you know all of this, if you are naturally full of passion there will be times when it gets the better of you and that’s ok. If you can laugh it off, see it as part of the continuous learning we all go through in life rather than as a mistake. We are so much easier to be around when yoweu can be gentle on ourselves.